My family, like most, depends on a lot of online services. And again like most, a lot of those services come from Big
Tech giants in general and (in our case) Google in particular. And like many people, we are becoming less comfortable with that.
So I’m going to try to be systematic about addressing the problem. This post summarizes our dependencies and then I’ll post blog
pieces about updates as I work my way through the list. (The first is already posted, see below.)
I’m calling this the “De-Google” project because they’re our chief supplier of this stuff and it’s more euphonious than
“De-BigTechInGeneral”.
Need | Supplier | Alternatives |
Office |
Google Workspace |
? |
Data sharing |
Dropbox |
? |
Video meetings |
Google
Meet |
Jitsi, ? |
Maps |
Google Maps |
Magic Earth, Here, something OSM-based |
Browser |
Apple Safari |
Firefox, ? |
Search |
Google |
Bing-based options |
Chat |
Signal |
|
Photo editing |
Adobe
Lightroom & Nik |
Capture One, Darktable, ? |
In-car interface |
Google Android Auto |
Automaker software |
Play my music |
Plex, USB |
|
Discover music |
Google YouTube Music |
Qobuz, Tidal, Deezer,
Pandora, ? |
TV |
Prime, Roku, Apple, Netflix, TSN, Sportsnet |
? |
The “Supplier” color suggests my feelings about what I’m using, with blue standing for neutral.
Criteria
To replace the things that I’m unhappy with, I’m looking for some combination of:
Open source
Not ad-supported
Not VC-funded
Not Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Amazon
Office
We’ve been using Gmail for a really long time and are used to it, and the integration between mail and calendar and maps
basically Just Works. The price is OK but it keeps going up, and so do our data storage requirements, what with all the cameras in
the family. Finally, Google has stewardship of our lives and are probably monetizing every keystroke.
We’re getting a bit creeped out over that.
I think that calendars and email are kind of joined at the hip, so we’d want a provider that does both.
As for online docs, I will not be sorry to shake the dust of Google Drive and Docs from my heels, I find them clumsy and am
always having trouble finding something that I know is in there.
Data sharing
Dropbox is OK, assuming you ignore all the other stuff it’s trying to sell you. Maybe one of these years I should look at
that other stuff and see if it’s a candidate to replace one or two other services?
Video meetings
I dislike lots of things about Zoom and find Microsoft Teams a pool of pain, but have been pretty happy with Google
Meet. Nobody has to download or log into anything and it seems to more or less Just Work. But I’d look at alternatives.
Maps
As I
wrote in 2017, Google maps aggregate directions, reviews,
descriptions, phone numbers, and office hours. They are potentially a nuclear-powered monopoly engine. I use Maps more and
more; if I
want to contact or interact with something whose location I know, it’s way quicker to pull up Maps and click on their listing than it
is to use Google search and fight through all the ads and spam.
The calendar integration is fabulous. If you have Android Auto and you’re going to a meeting, pull up the calendar app and
tap on the meeting and it drops you right into directions.
The quality of the OpenStreetMap data is very good, but obviously they don’t have the Directions
functions. Who does? Obviously,
Here does, and
I was enthused about it in 2019; but Android
Auto’s music powers drew me back to Google Maps.
Aside from that, Magic Earth is trying, and their business model seems acceptable, but
the product was pretty rough-edged last time I tried it.
Browser
Safari is my daily driver. These days Chrome is starting to creep me out a bit; just doesn’t feel like it’s on my side. Also,
it’s no longer faster than the competition. I’d like to shift over to Firefox one day when I have the energy
Then there are the Arcs and Braves and Vivaldis of this world, but I just haven’t yet invested the time to
figure out if one of these will do, and I do not detect a wave of consensus out there.
By the way, DuckDuckGo has a browser, a shell over Safari on the Mac and Edge on Windows. Lauren uses it a lot.
Probably worth a closer look.
Search
The decline of Google Search is increasingly in everyone’s face. Once again, it refuses to find things on this blog that I know
are there.
Others in the family have already migrated to DuckDuckGo, and I now feel like an old-school lagger for still not having
migrated off Google. I wish there were someone else taking a serious run at indexing the Web other than Bing — from yet another tech giant — but here we are.
Lauren tells me to have a closer look at
Ecosia, which seems very wholesome.
Chat
At the moment you will have to pry Signal out of my cold, dead, hands. You should be using it too. ’Nuff said.
Photo editing
I pay my monthly tribute to Adobe, about whom my feelings aren’t as negative as they are about the mega Tech
Giants.
I’d like not to pay so much, and I’d like something that runs a little faster than Lightroom, and I’d like to support open
source. But… I really like Lightroom, and sometimes one absolutely needs Photoshop, so I’m unlikely to prioritize this
particular escape attempt.
In-car interface
Choices are limited. I see little point in migrating between Android Auto and CarPlay, which leaves the software the auto
maker installed. Which, in my
five-year-old Jaguar is… well, not bad actually. I think I could live
with the built-in maps and directions from Here, even with the British Received Pronunciation’s butchery of North
American place names.
But, I don’t know, we might stay with Android Auto. Check out this screenshot from my car.
(Pardon the blurs and distortions.)
This is Android Auto displaying, as it normally does when I’m driving, maps and music. By default, Google Maps and YouTube
Music. But not here; on the right is
Plex, playing my own music stored on a Mac Mini at home.
On the left, it’s even more interesting: This is neither Google maps nor a competitor; it’s
Gaia GPS, the app I normally use to mark trail while bushwhacking through Pacific
Northwest rain forests. Somehow I fat-fingered it into place either in the car or on my phone.
The lesson here is that (for the moment at least) Android Auto seems to be genuinely neutral. It knows the general
concepts of “apps that play music” and “apps that are maps” and is happy to display whichever ones you want, not just Google’s.
(As a former Android geek who knows about Intents and Filters, I can see how this works. Clever.)
So far, Android Auto doesn’t show ads, but I suppose it’s monetizing me by harvesting traffic information to enrich its maps
and I guess that’s a bargain I can live with. I use that data myself when I want to go somewhere and there are multiple routes
and I can see which one is backed up by sewer work or whatever.
Discover music
I’ve been paying for YouTube Music since before it existed, and I’m genuinely impressed with the way its algorithm fishes up
new artists that it turns out I really like. But just now Google laid off a bunch of
YouTube Music “contractors” (de facto, employees) who tried to organize a union, so screw ’em.
I haven’t investigated any of the alternatives in depth yet.
Play my music
In the decades where Compact Disks were the way to acquire music, I acquired a lot. And ripped it. And pushed it up into
Google’s musical cloud. And (until recently) could shuffle my musical life on YouTube Music. But they removed that feature from
Android Auto, so screw ’em.
But I now have two good ways to do this. Check this out in
Play My Music.
TV
The same gripe as everyone else: The streaming services have re-invented Cable TV, which I only got around to dumping a
couple of years ago. The right solution is obvious: Pay-per-view at a reasonably low price, then the services could
compete on producing great shows that people will pay to see, rather than sucking you into yet another
subscription.
I suspect this column will stay red for quite a while. It’s amazing how much business leaders hate simple business
models where there’s a clean clear one-time price for a product and customers have a clean clear choice who they buy their
products from.
The path forward
I don’t know if I’ll ever turn the center column all-green. And I don’t need to; progress is progress. Anyhow, doing this
sort of investigation is kind of fun.